(238e) Highly Durable Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cathodes for Heavy Duty Transportation Applications

In this presentation, we present the nanoengineering development of highly durable and high-performance efficient cathodes for PEMFCs, utilizing mesoporous carbons as supports and platinum as the electrocatalyst. Through our study, we have established novel cathodes that allow high catalytic activity, performance, durability, and carbon corrosion resistance—a very rare combination to be found in one material. To obtain this material, a range of mesoporous carbon supports with different porosity and graphitization degrees have been tested for performance and durability in a single-cell PEMFC device. Screening of these mesoporous carbon supports enables us to reveal the main characteristics of a carbon support that can lead to a robust PEMFCs cathode that can mitigate platinum dissolution and performance losses after extended several thousands of accelerated durability test while being itself corrosion resistive.